Lincoln in the Bardo

Set in February 1862, this novel begins with the death of Willie Lincoln, the president's eleven-year-old son, and his burial in a Georgetown cemetery. From this historical seed, the narrative descends into the bardo, a Tibetan concept of the transitional state between life and death. Here, Willie’s spirit is surrounded by a chaotic chorus of other ghosts, including a grieving Abraham Lincoln who returns to the crypt to hold his son’s body. The text is a dense, polyphonic collage of voices that oscillates between the mundane and the metaphysical, exploring the mechanics of grief, the persistence of memory, and the struggle for the soul’s passage.

Description adapted from Open Library ↗.